In 1994, a second group of mercenaries arrived at the airport in Johannesburg... but no one was there to pick them up. Their host had been arrested days earlier, after the last group of mercenaries she'd hosted got into a deadly shootout with the South African police. But how did all these Germans end up in South Africa in the first place? https://www.propublica.org/article/vasilios-pistolis-imprisoned-marine-hate-groupsSources:Simonelli, F. J. (1999). American Führer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. University of Illinois Press.Krott, R. (2008). Save the last bullet for yourself: A soldier of fortune in the Balkans and Somalia. Casemate. Eisenberg, D. (1967). The Reemergence of Fascism. Barnes.https://balkans.aljazeera.net/news/balkan/2017/11/29/slobodan-praljak-umro-u-bolniciBartholomäus Grill: German right-wing radicals shoot in South Africa: License plate D. In: Die Zeit . No. 13 , 25 March 1994Antifaschistisches Autorenkollektiv: Drahtzieher im braunen Netz : Ein aktueller Überblick über den Neonazi-Untergrund in Deutschland und Österreich. Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1996,https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/jm214q33q?locale=ithttps://js.emory.edu/news/news-stories-container/Using%20South%20African%20Archives%20to%20Study%20PostWorld%20War%20Two%20Antisemitism%20and%20White%20Supremacist%20Networks.html https://scholar.ufs.ac.za/server/api/core/bitstreams/c7f1b03d-343d-4abf-bcb3-e508f43dbc90/content https://antifainfoblatt.de/aib99/dressed-killSearchlight Magazine, issues July, August, September 1996See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.
I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast, Math& Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
I'm having conversations with some folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reach the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use.
I'll be joined by innovative leaders like chairman and CEO of Elf Beauty, Tarang Amin.
Legendary singer, songwriter, and philanthropist, Jewel.
Being a rock star is very fun, but helping people is way more fun.
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I figured out the formulas have to work hard, then that's magic.
Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever-important creative spark, the magic.
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I'm ready to fight.
Oh, this is fighting words.
Okay, I'll put the hammer back.
Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a best-selling author with the second most banned book in America.
Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back.
Part of the power of Black queer creativity is the fact that we got us, you know?
We are the greatest culture makers in world history.
Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You Feelin' This Too is a horror anthology podcast.
It brings different creators to tell ten vile, grotesque, horrific stories on what scares them the most.
You Feelin' This Too.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin.
This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people, like writer and actor Dan Aykroyd.
I love writing more than anything.
You're left alone, you know, you do three hours in the morning, you write three hours in the afternoon, go pick up a kid from school, and write at night, and after nine hours, you come out with seven pages, and then you're moving on.
Listen to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
early March of 1994, three men left the Bosnian city of Siroki-Brieg.
German mercenaries Falk Semang and Ralf Marakas were eager for a change of scenery.
Not because they had tired of their lives as soldiers of fortune, but because they were in a bit of hot water after murdering two of their fellow mercenaries.
And Ronald Doyster, a Dutch mercenary they'd worked with on his last stint with the Croatian forces, was happy to recruit them to a new mission, one far away from the mess they'd made in the Balkans.
Before they left, they took a few souvenirs.
A couple of AK-47s.
One pistol, eight kilos of Semtex, a plastic explosive, and a crate of hand grenades.
They stashed the stolen weapons under the seats of the old citron that Doyster was driving.
Doyster was no stranger to committing crimes across borders.
He'd been a soldier for hire for over a decade, and had served a bit of time in Ireland for arms smuggling.
He was confident that his expertly forged UN press credentials were all they'd need to ensure a clean getaway without anyone searching the vehicle.
And he was right.
After driving nearly 2,000 kilometers, they reached their first destination, the Belgian city of Rousselara.
There, they met with Roger Spinuin, the leader of a Belgian neo-Nazi group called the Order of Flemish Militants.
He was a bit of a legend in...
Certain circles.
He was already an old man, but in the 70s he'd led a small group of Belgian Nazis in a daring heist of sorts, successfully stealing the corpse of a long-dead Nazi priest from his grave in Austria to be reinterred on his home soil in Belgium.
And on that day in March of 1994, Spinoin paid Doister 11,000 Deutschmarks for the stolen weapons.
But he gave him one more thing.
Directions. It had been Spinoin who had asked Oyster to return to Bosnia this one last time.
Not as a mercenary this time, but to fetch hardware and recruits for a new mission.
One in South Africa.
The aging neo-Nazi had spent his life fighting for fascism at home in Belgium.
His son John was a member of parliament as a leader in the far-right party Vlaams Blok.
But as the world continued to change around him, he hoped to retire one day in a beautiful white ethnostate in southern Africa.
Here on the eve of the end of apartheid, though, that dream was starting to look less and less likely.
Unless they could incite enough violence in those final months to convince the white population of South Africa that they needed to secede to form a new, pure white nation.
And this was the task he'd recruited these mercenaries for.
It wasn't safe to depart directly from Belgium.
The authorities there were already a little suspicious.
Instead, the mercenaries took the ferry across the English Channel to Ramsgate, a seaside town in Kent.
There, with an introduction from Spinuin, they made their next contacts, members of the British fascist group the League of St. George.
They spent a few days there making final preparations for their journey, with the help of their new English friends.
This was becoming something of a routine for the members of the League of St. George.
Just two months earlier, they'd hosted another batch of German mercenaries making the same trip.
They didn't know, just yet, that one of those men was already dead.
On the evening before Doyster and the Germans were scheduled to fly out of Heathrow, Roger Spinuin dispatched one of his sons to Ramsgate with one final message for the mercenaries.
Willie Spinuin handed Ronald Doyster a sealed envelope and passed along his father's order.
Doyster was to personally hand-deliver this envelope to the woman who would meet him at the airport, a woman named Monica Huggett.
I'm Molly Conger, and this...
as weird little guys.
This is the part of the story where we finally rejoin the woman we started with.
Monica Huggett Stone.
It's been a long, strange journey.
We started out a few weeks ago in 2012 in Sacramento, California.
American neo-Nazis from the Golden State skinheads were rallying outside the state capitol, holding the flag of apartheid South Africa, when counter-protesters from a nearby Occupy encampment showed up to heckle them.
What an odd sight, those skinheads in their black jackets rallying for the imaginary cause of a white genocide against South African farmers.
That rally was one of more than a dozen simultaneous rallies across the United States that day, though they were mostly poorly attended and some were barely publicized.
And all of them were organized by a short-lived, Aryan Nations-affiliated group called the South Africa Project.
And that group itself was almost certainly really just two people.
A longtime Aryan Nations member named Morris Goulet, I'm always surprised by the twists and turns that these stories take.
Once you start turning over a few rocks, there's always some bizarre new angle that takes us miles from where I thought we were going.
But this one has been the strangest ride of any weird little guy so far.
In this chapter of the story, We'll try to trace the paths of these European mercenaries from Bosnia to South Africa.
It turns out there was an international network to funnel guns for hire from one conflict to another.
And as cloak and dagger as all of that sounds, it wasn't really a secret.
Not entirely.
Searchlight Magazine had reported on the scheme months.
Before those German mercenaries even bought their plane tickets.
Every year, for decades now, European neo-Nazis gather in the Belgian city of Dixmude for an international fascist get-together.
And at the event in 1993, there was a lot of talk about changing their focus, about redirecting mercenaries from the Balkans to South Africa.
And plans were made.
At least 15 mercenaries were pledged to be dispatched in early 1994, with plans to fight alongside Robert Van Tonder's Borostock party.
All of this was published, in print, in English, in the fall of 1993, months before this actually happened.
That same publication, Searchlight Magazine, would eventually uncover more of the details about what went on at Dixmude in 1993.
It was at this summit that Roger Spinuin recruited Ronald Doyster to return to Bosnia to recruit more mercenaries for South Africa.
And, according to another source, it was also sometime in late 1993 that Roger Spinuin paid a visit to South Africa himself at the invitation of Monica Huggett.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that the first step in tracking this Monica Stone, the one who organized those rallies in 2012, back to her home country of South Africa, was figuring out her maiden name, which is Hug It.
And I did that by digging up old corporate filings for a Christian identity church called the New Christian Crusade Church.
And the New Christian Crusade Church was run by a man named James K. Warner.
I don't think Warner necessarily qualifies as a big name, but he shows up in a lot of big stories.
He was an early member of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party.
He was a leading member of the short-lived National States Rights Party.
And in his Klan days, he was a very close friend of David Duke.
I've left myself a note to come back.
to James K. Warner.
I think there's some real weird little guy stuff going on here.
And I do have a quick correction to make.
As much as it pains me, I just realized I misspoke in the last episode where I mentioned James K. Warner.
I called him Robert K. Warner.
Careless, honestly.
I should have caught that, but to be honest with you, I'm recording this at one in the morning, and this is...
Early by my usual standards.
I'm always a little down to the wire.
But I think what happened there was just a slight mix-up.
Because in my defense, James Conrad Warner did have a brother named Robert L. Warner.
And he did use his brother's name on the deeds to some of the church property.
But it turns out that Monica's connection to Robert K. Warner may be the answer to a question that's been bothering me for weeks.
How on earth did a woman in South Africa manage to join the Ku Klux Klan?
If you recall the story in the episode two weeks ago, Monica Huggett was arrested in 1981 in connection with a series of pro-apartheid bombings by a group that called itself the Vid Commando.
And after her arrest, she agreed to testify against the Italian fascists that she'd helped carry out those bombings.
During the trial, she said she was a member of the American Ku Klux Klan, and she told the authorities that the books they'd used as a guide for making those bombs had been sent to her by her American Klan contacts.
So she wasn't just a member of a Ku Klux Klan-style group that operated independently in South Africa.
She's saying that she has active contact with the Klan in the United States.
Because there is a big difference there.
There have been groups in other countries that have adopted the aesthetic and the ideology of the Klan without necessarily maintaining meaningful contact with the group they're modeling themselves after.
In other examples, what looks like a foreign iteration of the Klan is actually just an American who happens to be living overseas.
In the 1980s, there was an American serviceman stationed in Germany who claimed that he was leading an active Klan group in Bavaria.
And in the Dennis Mahon story, we saw an American Klansman who traveled internationally, trying to spark an interest in American Klan aesthetics and ideology, but with relatively little success.
So what Monica's talking about here is something a little different.
And I was stumped.
Truly. As we'll get to later on in the story, I can absolutely connect Monica Huggett Stone to the American Ku Klux Klan by the 1990s.
I've got the Federal Election Commission filings to prove that.
That's easy.
But I still have no answers when it comes to the question of Klansmen in South Africa in the late 1970s.
Not in any concrete way.
But I do have a theory.
One of the sources I've relied on heavily throughout this series is a 1999 thesis by Maida Visser on the white fascist movements in South Africa in the 20th century.
And she sort of hints at this idea.
She writes, The activities of the Klan in South Africa are obscure.
Although the police had no concrete evidence that the movement was active in South Africa, there were claims in the press in the late 70s.
And so in Visser's thesis, she gives a couple of examples that are definitely evidence of that aesthetic copycat behavior I'm talking about.
So when the Vit Commando took credit for those bombings in 1980, the letters they sent to the press had a symbol in the letterhead that was almost identical to the logo used by American clan groups.
And in 1990, when two members of the Order of Death went on trial for murder, their supporters packed the courtroom, and they were all wearing little Klan lapel pens.
And one of them even told a reporter, The Order is long gone.
It's the Ku Klux Klan now.
In an unrelated side note, just to wrap up a loose end from the last episode, I can tell I've spent too much time digging around for details I'm...
Not going to need for this story when side characters start to look really familiar.
When I was reading that anecdote about the Order of Death trial in 1990, I recognized the names of the murderers.
Cornelius Laudering and Fanny Goosen were two of the ten members of the Afrikaner resistance movement who were arrested in the summer of 1990.
So when they scooped up Leonard Wienendahl and Horst Klenz, Lottering and Guzen were in that bunch.
And I mentioned in last week's episode that I couldn't exactly tell what became of all ten of those men, but two of them had escaped from custody, and those two were Lottering and Guzen.
So I guess they found them again because they did get convicted of murder.
But back to the question of the Klan.
I could have left it there.
But I think you probably know by now that I didn't.
Because if you dig just a little bit deeper into the past, there was a man in South Africa who called himself the leader of the South African Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s and into the 70s.
He died in the late 70s.
His name was Raymond Kirch Rudman.
And by the time he was trying to get a South African Klan going, Pretty old, and he was decades into his career as a professional anti-Semite, with impressive international connections.
Aside from his clan activities, Rudman was also the leader of an Afrikaner nationalist group called the Bora Nasi, originally founded by Maney Meritz.
Meritz's son, also called Maney Meritz, was a prominent figure in the Afrikaner resistance movement during the same time period as Monica Huggett.
And Rudman also led a group called the Anglo-Norman Union.
I can't find much information about the extent to which that group actually operated in South Africa.
Did it actually have real members?
But in 1965, Rudman did use the group to join the World Union of National Socialists.
That was an effort by George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party and Colin Jordan, who was then the head of the National Socialist Movement in the United Kingdom, to form, I guess exactly what it sounds, a world union of Nazi groups.
But when it comes to the Klan, there's not much written, at least not that I was able to find, about the history of the Klan in South Africa.
But everything that does exist...
Has Ray Rudman's name on it?
Last year, Dr. William Robert Billups completed his dissertation at Emory University.
And I know, I know that dissertation has the answers I'm looking for, but it is currently embargoed and not available to read.
But a write-up about his research tells me I'm on the right track.
He was researching anti-Semitic bombings in the United States during the Civil Rights era.
When he came across one of the same sources I did.
An old mention of Ray Rudman trying to recruit for a Klan group in South Africa in the early 1960s.
Billups was able to secure grant funding to spend several weeks in South Africa at the University of the Free State, where Rudman's personal papers are held in a special collection.
Again, unfortunately for me, I can't read Billups' research.
But I do have the finding aid for Rudman's papers.
I can't actually see what's written.
The documents aren't digitized.
A finding aid is just an inventory listing the contents of various boxes and folders.
And I would love to get my hands on some of those letters.
Because listed in that inventory are entries for correspondence between Ray Rudman and the New Christian Crusade Church.
Dated as early as the 60s and 70s.
There's also an entry listing correspondence between Ray Rudman and the National States' Rights Party, dated from the 1950s.
The inventory also lists more than 40 books in Rudman's collection that were published by James K. Warner, either through his Sons of Liberty Press or the New Christian Crusade Church.
A similar finding aid for the personal papers of James K. Warner, held by the University of Wyoming, also lists correspondence between James Warner and Ray Rudman.
And Warner's Nazi publishing outfit, the Sons of Liberty Press, also published and sold English-language versions of texts by South African anti-Semite Johan Schumann and Afrikaner nationalist politician Yap Mare.
So I can't tell you...
Exactly how Monica Huggett came to join the Ku Klux Klan.
But there is some really solid connective tissue here.
It doesn't feel as random now.
So when she moved to the United States, she was a close enough associate of James K. Warner that he put her in charge of his new Christian crusade church.
And that has to have something to do with the fact that archives show that he was in active communication with the far right in South Africa from his earliest days in the movement.
It looks like I have some more digging to do on the subject of the fascist international, because the number of connections here is honestly pretty staggering to me.
James K. Warner visited England in the 70s to speak at a meeting of the League of St. George.
In 1980, our Belgian Nazi, Roger Spinuin, was deported from the United States while he was here visiting members of the National States' Rights Party.
And our South African Klansman, Ray Rudman, was listed as the South African correspondent in issues of a British fascist magazine in the 1970s.
All of these guys are connected, going back decades.
But... I've been promising to get to this part of the story for weeks now.
The part where a handful of German mercenaries get into a shootout with the South African police in March of 1994.
A few episodes ago, I told you that one of the first places I found Monica Huggett's name was in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report.
In Volume 2...
The portion of the report that deals with, quote, The Commission of Gross Violations of Human Rights.
Chapter 7, Political Violence in the Era of Negotiations and Transition.
Under the subheading, Links with International Right-Wing Groups.
The report reads, The first link between ultra-right terrorism and foreign agencies came to light in 1982 when Mr. Fabio Miriello Mr. Massimo Bolo and Mr. Eugenio's office, all white foreign expatriates known as the White Commando, were convicted of the 1979 bombing of the offices of prominent academic Dr. Jan Lombard.
Originally, Mr. Kuz Vermeulen and Miss Monica Huggett were arrested with them, but Huggett turned state's witness and Vermeulen was released after a few days.
Huggett's name was subsequently linked to a shootout in March of 1994 between the South African police and three German right-wingers in the Donkerhoek area.
One German right-winger, Mr. Stephen Reyes, was arrested, Mr. Thomas Kunz was shot dead, and a third, Mr. Horst Glens, was later arrested.
A fourth, Mr. Alexander Niedlein, was later charged in the Cullinan Magistrates Court for illegal possession of a firearm.
And I read that paragraph before.
You've heard that bit.
And at this point, you know some of the backstory that paragraph is talking about.
Two weeks ago, we talked about the Vit Commando bombings in 1980, and we spent most of the last episode talking about one of those men, Horst Klens.
Before that shootout in 1994, Klens had been involved in a 1989 attack on a United Nations outpost in Namibia, killing a security guard and later murdering a police constable when he and his accomplices escaped from custody.
And at some point, I teased you a little bit.
With a story about Alexander Neidlein.
He was the German neo-Nazi who swore allegiance to Donald Trump at a fascist rally in Croatia in 2017.
So we know where Horst Klens was in the early 90s.
He was in South Africa.
But how did those other three men actually get there in 1994?
Alexander Niedlein, Stephen Reyes, and Thomas Kunst followed the same path as the mercenaries recruited by Ronald Deister.
They deserted from the convicts' battalion.
A paramilitary unit of the Croatian Defense Council made up of prisoners and foreign mercenaries, and they left Bosnia with stolen weapons.
Then, with the help of the League of St. George in England, they made their way down to South Africa.
And just like Ronald Doyster, they were given the name of a woman who would pick them up from the airport.
Monica Huggett.
Monica Huggett.
you you Thank you.
We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey.
We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family.
They showcased a sense of love that I never had before.
I mean, he's not only my parent, like, he's like my best friend.
At the end of the day, it's all been worth it.
I wouldn't change a thing about our lives.
Learn about adopting a teen from foster care.
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Ever wonder what it would be like to be mentored by today's top business leaders?
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Here's some advice from Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on standing out from the leadership crowd.
Develop your EQ. A lot of people have plenty of brains, but EQ is, do you trust me?
Do I communicate well?
You know, when you walk in a room, do people feel good you're there?
Are you responsive to people?
Do people know you have a heart?
Develop the team.
Develop the people.
Create a system of trust, and it works over time.
I'm Dan Roth, LinkedIn's editor-in-chief.
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On November 5th, 2018, at 6:33 a.m., a red Volkswagen Golf was found abandoned in a ditch out in Sleep Hole Valley.
The driver's seat door was open.
No traces of footsteps leaving the vehicle.
No belongings were found, except for a cassette tape lodged in the player.
On that tape were 10, No, no, no, no, no, no, no!
Grotesque. Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Horrific stories that to this day have been kept restricted from the public.
Until now.
You feeling this too?
A horror anthology podcast.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention.
This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war.
J. Edgar Hoover was furious.
Somebody violated the FBI, and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees.
The FBI went around to all their neighbors and said to them, Do you think these people are good Americans?
It's got heists, tragedy, a trial of the century, and the goddamnedest love story you've ever heard.
I picked up the phone, and my thought was, this is the most important phone call I'll ever make in my life.
I couldn't believe it.
I mean, Brendan, it was divine intervention.
Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
*Music*
And here is another place in my research for this story where I found a very unlikely source of information that I just couldn't have gotten anywhere else.
Two weeks ago, I had to give my begrudging thanks to the Central Intelligence Agency after discovering English translations of South African news stories in archived reports from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service.
And this week, I have an even more unsavory source to thank, though he isn't around to hear it.
This is the prosecution's appeal concerning Pralyak in all other respects, affirms the sentence of 20 years of imprisonment subject to credit being given under Rule 101C of the rules for the period he has already spent in detention.
Pradyak, you may be seated.
Stop, please.
Please sit down.
That audio might not sound familiar, but if you're extremely online, you've seen memified images of this moment used as a reaction gif a thousand times.
I know it.
I'm sure you know the one I'm talking about.
It's a white-haired old man in a suit, and he's drinking from a small vial.
That man is Slobodan Pralyak.
He died by suicide in 2017, and the meme shows the moment that he produced a small vial of cyanide from his pocket, after a judge at The Hague announced that his sentence for war crimes would be upheld.
I don't speak Croatian, but news reports translated his last words in that video as, Judges, Slobodan Prolyak is not a war criminal.
With disdain, I reject your verdict.
And then he knocks back the vial of cyanide.
We don't have to get into the crimes against humanity that Slobodan Prolyak was convicted of by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.
He doesn't really factor in directly to our story at all.
But he did choose to defend himself without an attorney during his war crimes trial.
And as part of that effort, he had a website dedicated to proving his innocence.
And that website is actually still online today.
But the documents that I found most useful in researching this story don't appear to be accessible on the current version of the site.
So buried in this...
I found something terribly interesting.
All of the existing reporting that I could find about Alexander Ninelein, Stephen Reyes, and Thomas Kunst and their whereabouts in late 1993 seems to rely on one of those documents, an arrest warrant signed by their commanding officer.
A war criminal named Mladen Nalatilik, which I know I've not pronounced correctly, so we'll just call him by his nickname, Tuta.
Everyone else did.
When those three German mercenaries deserted from Tuta's ragtag convicts battalion in the middle of December of 1993, he wrote a memo requesting arrest warrants.
Translated, it reads, On December 16, 1993, members of the convict's battalion fled from Sirocchi-Brieg to an unknown destination after spending three to four days in the unit after stealing weapons and ammunition.
The memo goes on to specify that, aside from their names and the fact that they'd been briefly affiliated with the unit, he had no additional information about these three men.
It's possible that a lot is lost in translation here, but it kind of looks like he's really going out of his way to distance himself from these men, because he's very explicit that they were only there for a few days, and he doesn't know anything about them.
These guys are strangers to him.
And I guess there's no reason to doubt that.
It's what every write-up about the incident says, and who knows, maybe they got all the way there and they realized...
War isn't very fun, and they change their minds.
That makes plenty of sense, right?
But I think it would be terribly naive to take a war criminal at his word.
Because he was lying.
In that chaotic document dump on Slobodan Prolyak's website, I found Tuta's request for the issuance of those arrest warrants, and I found the arrest warrants themselves.
And they were both signed, I clicked through, I don't know, maybe a hundred documents that mostly meant absolutely nothing to me.
I didn't really know what I was looking for or what might even be there for me to find.
But I did find another document bearing the signature of the commander of the Convex Battalion.
And this one was dated December 2nd, 1993, a full two weeks before those men deserted.
And it's a list of soldiers under Tuta's command, and it appears to have been written on a typewriter.
And next to the name of each soldier who had been paid for their service in the month of November, he had drawn a checkmark in pencil.
And there, 24 pages into this list of names, are Alexander Niedlein, Stephen Reyes, and Thomas Kunst.
Niedlein and Kunst both have a checkmark next to their name.
Nightline has, over the years, taken issue with journalists who characterize him as a mercenary, often arguing that he never actually got paid, so he can't be called a mercenary.
So this document at least offers some possible rebuttal to that.
Next to Stephen Ray's name, though, there isn't a checkmark.
Instead, there's a little symbol that...
Looks like it might be the letter D. I think the soldiers who have died are the ones with the little cross next to their name.
And soldiers who are in the hospital either have a B or the word bolnica, which means hospital, written out.
And I couldn't find any commonly used word for something like dead, deceased, killed, deserted, quit, captured, any...
Any words like that.
I couldn't find any that would start with D in Croatian.
But there are some words and phrases related to the concept of authorized leave or a permitted absence that do start with D in Croatian.
I'm just spitballing here.
I have no idea what it could mean.
I don't know anything about running a mercenary unit.
to do war crimes and I don't speak Croatian.
I'm just guessing.
But regardless of what these mysterious little symbols mean, here's their commanding officer's signature on a document listing their names two weeks before he says they had only just shown up in the last couple of days.
We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey.
We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family.
They showcased a sense of love that I never had before.
I mean, he's not only my parent, he's like my best friend.
At the end of the day, it's all been worth it.
I wouldn't change a thing about our lives.
Learn about adopting a teen from foster care.
Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more.
Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council.
Ever wonder what it would be like to be mentored by today's top business leaders?
My podcast, This Is Working, can help with that.
Here's some advice from Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on standing out from the leadership crowd.
Develop your EQ.
A lot of people have plenty of brains, but EQ is, do you trust me?
Do I communicate well?
You know, when you walk in a room, do people feel good you're there?
Are you responsive to people?
Do people know you have a heart?
Develop the team, develop the people, create a system of trust, and it works over time.
I'm Dan Roth, LinkedIn's editor-in-chief.
On my podcast, This Is Working, leaders like Jamie Dimon, Mark Cuban, and Richard Branson share strategies for success and the real lessons that have shaped them.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On November 5th, 2018, at 6.33 a.m., a red Volkswagen Golf was found abandoned in a ditch out in Sleep Hole Valley.
The driver's seat door was open.
No traces of footsteps leaving the vehicle.
No belongings were found, except for a cassette tape lodged in the player.
On that tape were ten vile, grotesque, horrific stories that to this day have been kept restricted from the public.
Until now.
Bonnie! You feeling this too?
A horror anthology podcast.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Something about Mary Poppins?
Something about Mary Poppins.
Exactly. Oh man, this is fun.
I'm AJ Jacobs and I am an author and a journalist and I tend to get obsessed with stuff.
And my current obsession is puzzles.
And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler.
Dressing. Dressing.
French dressing.
Exactly. Oh, that's good.
Now, you can get your Daily Puzzle Nuggets delivered straight to your ears.
I thought to myself, I bet I know what this is.
And now I definitely know what this is.
This is so weird.
This is fun.
Let's try this one.
Our brand new season features special guests like Chuck Bryant, Mayim Bialik, Julie Bowen, Sam Sanders, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and lots more.
Listen to The Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
That's awful.
and I should have seen it coming.
The obvious next question then, Is why would he lie about how long they'd been with the unit?
The short answer, obviously, is I don't know.
I don't think anybody knows.
But if I had to guess, I would say he was covering his ass.
The convicts battalion was becoming increasingly unpopular by late 1993.
It... And they were out of control.
A letter sent to a Croatian general signed by another officer that same month, December of 1993, complained about Tuta's convicts running amok.
They weren't just committing war crimes.
But they were killing and raping military and police personnel on their own side.
And their commanding officer was protecting them.
So I can only assume that he was trying to distance himself from another embarrassing act of misconduct by this ragtag group of foreign murderers when these three Germans deserted the unit with a bunch of stolen guns and bombs.
Other sources I found writing about the actions of mercenaries in the Bosnian War single out the German mercenaries in particular for their brutality.
Rob Crott, a frequent contributor to Soldier of Fortune magazine, wrote in his book Save the Last Bullet for Yourself that the Germans he served with during the Bosnian War had a terrible habit of cutting the ears off the people they killed and keeping them as trophies.
Austrian journalist Christoph Santner co-wrote Ich geh jetzt Rambo spielen, which translates to I'm going to play Rambo now, with former mercenary Wolfgang Niederreiter.
And Niederreiter recounts seeing a German mercenary hand a live grenade to a seven-year-old Muslim boy in the Bosnian city of Mostar as a joke of some sort?
The mercenary told the boy it was a toy, and the child was blown to pieces moments later.
There was no shortage of violence in the Balkans in the early 90s.
There's plenty of blame to go around.
So it seems all the more remarkable that even in this context, other actual war criminals, people sentenced to life in prison at The Hague, people who were guns for hire, They were looking at these German mercenaries and saying, that's a little bit too much.
Now, I hesitate to build a theory on the sand of speculation.
But if that little D next to Stephen Reyes' name does happen to mean that he was on leave in November, that does line up with some other sort of...
Hazy details about this time period.
Because again, we know that there was an international effort to recruit mercenaries to travel to South Africa.
The two men from the beginning of this episode, Falk Zemang and Ralf Marachas, were recruited by Ronald Doister personally when he traveled to Bosnia in early 1994.
And by all accounts, Niedlein, Reis, and Kunst were recruited by Horst Klens.
But how?
Because remember, Horst Glens had been in South Africa for years at this point.
He escaped from custody in Namibia in 1989, and he fled back to South Africa.
He was arrested again in the summer of 1990 in connection with the Ordeborofok bombings, and he didn't end up getting charged with anything.
But he spent a while in jail while South African courts tried to figure out if they needed to extradite him to Namibia.
He was eventually, probably in late 1992, released on bond pending a final decision in the extradition matter.
And then he disappeared.
It is possible, I guess, that Klens could have gone to Bosnia at some point in 1993.
But I don't think so.
because there's a much more likely explanation.
30th, 31st, that's how he said he was on the other side.
He was on the other side.
"He was on the other side.
That probably didn't mean anything to you.
I speak a little German, but that guy's accent was a little tricky for me.
I had to ask a friend who was fluent for some help with this one.
That's a clip from a segment that aired on a German TV news program.
And the man speaking is an unnamed hotel guest.
Unnamed, probably because the hotel in question was a seedy establishment in Hamburg's Red Light District.
And the man is recalling for a reporter from Der Spiegel, an incident that happened in late October 1993.
Stephen Reyes was thrown out of the hotel.
After some kind of loud argument.
And just Stephen Reyes.
According to researchers from Germany's anti-fascist infoblot, Klens was also spotted in Hamburg in October of 1993.
And we know Stephen Reyes did go back to Bosnia after he got kicked out of that seedy motel because he deserted in December.
So what it looks like to me is that Reyes made contact with Klens in Hamburg in October, and then he went back to Bosnia and told his friends about this exciting new opportunity.
All they had to do was steal a bunch of What we do know for certain is that all three of those mercenaries left Bosnia on December 16th, 1993.
And on December 30th, They robbed a post office in the German city of Lübeck, making off with around 8,500 Deutschmarks.
I don't entirely know how to sort out how much money that is.
In 1993, one U.S. dollar was equal to about 1.6 Deutschmarks, so that would make it a little over $5,000.
But those are 1993 dollars?
So I guess you could best understand the actual value of this money is around 10,000 US dollars today.
Don't email me about math.
And with cash in hand, they traveled from Germany to Ramsgate, that little seaside town in England where members of the League of St. George drove them to the airport.
And just like the mercenaries that would follow them two months later, they were given a name.
Monica Huggett would pick them up from the airport when they got to South Africa.
They arrived on tourist visas in January of 1994, and Monica was there, as promised, to pick them up.
She sorted out their paperwork and work permits and their mercenary assignments, passing them off to Horst Klenz.
They were assigned as armed guards at Radio Pretoria.
An illegal radio station that broadcast Afrikaner nationalist propaganda.
And they participated in military drills, led by Willem Ratta, a former Rhodesian military officer.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan, until March 14, 1994.
By the time the next round of mercenaries arrived a few days later, there was no one there at the airport to greet them.
Thomas Kunst was dead, and Alexander Niedlein, Horst Klenz, Stephen Reyes, and Monica Huggett had all been arrested.
I really do hate to leave you hanging again.
I promise I'm not dragging this story out on purpose to torment you.
I was a little preoccupied this past week, and I'll be entirely otherwise occupied during the week you're hearing this.
If you're listening to this on the day it comes out, I am almost certainly sitting in court right now.
In October of last year, I did a couple of episodes about Virginia's burning objects law.
There was a pair of episodes on Barry Black, the Pennsylvania Klansman who challenged Virginia's cross-burning statute and eventually won his case at the Supreme Court.
And there was a third episode about a man who broke the law Virginia wrote to replace that original cross-burning ban.
In that episode, I talked a bit about the Nazi torch march that took place here, in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11th, 2017.
The episode was about Tyler Dykes, but he was just one of about a dozen men who've been charged with burning an object with the intent to intimidate.
That's the law that replaced the old cross-burning statute.
Well, this week, another one of those men is taking his case to trial.
So I lost a little bit of time this week reviewing the facts so I can be prepared to sit through the trial, and I'm going to lose the entire next week sitting on a wooden bench taking notes by hand.
I would love to promise you the final chapter of Monica Huggett's story is going to come next week, but if I'm being realistic, it'll be something else.
I've been planning to do sort of a Q&A episode, so it might be that.
You can submit questions for that on the Weird Little Guy subreddit.
Just please don't send them to me anywhere else, like on any other social media platform.
I'll just lose them.
So if you have a question, please post it to the subreddit, or if you absolutely, for some reason, cannot do that, you can email it to me.
But nowhere else, please.
And depending on how things go during the trial, I might have a mini-sode about the defendant.
If you're curious about Pistolas, I'll include a link in the show notes to the ProPublica article about his discharge from the Marines after he was revealed to be a member of Atomwaffen.
So thank you for bearing with me as I tell the story of Monica Stone in these strange little chunks.
I've really been enjoying how much digging this one has demanded of me.
I just need...
a little more time to read some very weird racist prophecies before I'm ready to write the last chapter.
Music Weird Little Guys is a production of Coolzone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagin.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast@gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
If you have a burning question for me about the show, it's not too late to get over to the subreddit and reply to a thread for an upcoming Q&A episode.
But as always, just don't post something that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
I'm ready to fight.
Oh, this is fighting worse.
Okay, I'll put the hammer back.
Hi, I'm George M. Johnson.
A best-selling author with the second most banned book in America.
Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back.
Part of the power of Black queer creativity is the fact that we got us, you know?
We are the greatest culture makers in world history.
Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.
I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast, Math& Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
I'm having conversations with some folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reach the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use.
I'll be joined by innovative leaders like chairman and CEO of Elf Beauty, Tarang Amin.
Legendary singer, songwriter, and philanthropist, Jewel.
Being a rock star is very fun, but helping people is way more fun.
And Damian Maldonado, CEO of American Pharmacology.
I figured out the formula.
I just have to work hard.
then that's magic.
Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever-important creative spark, the magic.
Listen to Math & Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You feeling this, too?
Is a horror anthology podcast.
It brings different creators to tell ten vile, grotesque, horrific stories on what scares them the most.
You feeling this too?
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin.
This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people, like writer and actor Dan Aykroyd.
I love writing more than anything.
You're left alone, you know, you do three hours in the morning, you write three hours in the afternoon, go pick up a kid from school, and write at night, and after nine hours, you come out with seven pages, and then you're moving on.
